Beautiful Wasteland critically examines the racial logics embedded in the contemporary stories of Detroit that flow through popular culture, from Internet forums, photography, films, advertising, to ...
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Beautiful Wasteland critically examines the racial logics embedded in the contemporary stories of Detroit that flow through popular culture, from Internet forums, photography, films, advertising, to news medias, in order to map the extension of the mythology of the frontier in American culture. Through analysing the cross-sections of these cultural locations, the book reveals the continued process of racialization in stories told about the rise, fall, and potential rise again of the city of Detroit. Detroit is indeed a ‘beautiful wasteland’, desirable and distressed in its narrative of ruin. The book is primarily a humanities-based audience. However, it is also interdisciplinary in focus in terms of theoretical and methodological intervention, as the study of the circulation of narratives is always in conversation with other ideas and discourses.Less

Rebecca J. Kinney

Published in print: 2016-11-01

Beautiful Wasteland critically examines the racial logics embedded in the contemporary stories of Detroit that flow through popular culture, from Internet forums, photography, films, advertising, to news medias, in order to map the extension of the mythology of the frontier in American culture. Through analysing the cross-sections of these cultural locations, the book reveals the continued process of racialization in stories told about the rise, fall, and potential rise again of the city of Detroit. Detroit is indeed a ‘beautiful wasteland’, desirable and distressed in its narrative of ruin. The book is primarily a humanities-based audience. However, it is also interdisciplinary in focus in terms of theoretical and methodological intervention, as the study of the circulation of narratives is always in conversation with other ideas and discourses.